There are many methods available for groups of individuals to engage in conferencing. One common method, videoconferencing, involves one or more individuals located in one location engaging in a videoconference with one or more individuals located in at least one other location, remote from the first. Videoconferencing involves the use of video equipment, such as cameras, microphones, displays and speakers. These videoconferences often create an artificial and unrealistic experience during the videoconference. There may be several factors contributing to the poor experience, such as when there are more remote users than there are remote cameras and/or local displays.
There are numerous different metrics used by traditional videoconference systems to determine how or where a video image is displayed. For example, some videoconference systems will only present one video signal at a time on a monitor. In these videoconference systems the video signal that is presented within the display is usually determined by voice activity (e.g., the last person to talk is the one that is presented) Some systems may support as many displays as there are remote sites participating in the videoconference. As the number of remote sites participating in the videoconference increase so does the number of displays, which causes the size of displays to decrease. Another example is videoconference systems that divide the monitor into a plurality of displays where each display is associated with a particular remote site (these types of videoconference systems are sometimes referred to a Hollywood Squares or Continuous Presence).
Often the metrics involved in Hollywood Squares type systems do not keep the same remote site within the same local display. For example, each display may initially be populated according to a particular pattern (e.g., left to right, top to bottom) based on the order in which each remote site logs into the videoconference. The displays are subsequently updated based on voice activity. More specifically, the remote site not presented in any of the local displays may, upon speaking, replace the remote site that has been quiet the longest. Accordingly, during the course of a videoconference, a particular remote site may, at some point during the videoconference, have spent some time in each of the displays.
Typical videoconferences also usually use WebPages to push data from a remote site to a local display.